Baseball is a sport that is loved and played by many around the world. This sport has long been known as “America’s pastime.” Baseball was not created in the United States, it was brought from the popularity of American football. Baseball is extremely connected to the United States and has plenty of all-time known players such as Babe Ruth, Shohei Ohtani, and more. These all-time famous players range from being national icons to being the home of Major League Baseball, the top baseball league in the world. Even though America popularizes baseball, and has a major cultural connection to it, this sport has been carried on around the globe, like in places such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Japan, and more. These are places that have many contributions that have been made to baseball’s deep and varied history.
The term baseball was dated to be created in 1744, in John Newbery’s children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. This book contains an illustrated poem describing a game called “Base-ball.” This book interestingly shows the marks of the bases and the ones for the home plate being flat, which is fairly similar to what it is like now. This book became fairly popular in England and was reprinted in North America in 1962 in New York and in 1787 in Massachusetts.
Plenty of references to bat and ball games involving bases are known. In 1749, a British newspaper refers to Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, playing the sport “Baseball” in Surrey, England, “Playing at base” at the American Army camp at Valley Forge in 1778. This was forbidding students to “play with balls and sticks” on the commons of Princeton College in 1778; a note in the memoirs of Thurlow Weed, an upstate New York newspaper editor and politician, of a baseball club created around the year 1825. From a newspaper report that came around that time, the Rochester Baseball Club had around 50 members in practice in 1820.
The Boy’s Own Book (1828), a frequently reprinted book in English sports played by boys at the time, included in the second edition a chapter on the game of “rounders.” As said there, rounders had many resemblances to the modern game of baseball. It was played on a diamond-shaped field with a base at each corner of the inner field, and the fourth being shaped differently than the others, and would be the base the batter stood at with the bat and would hit the pitched ball. The player who hit the pitched ball, either in the infield or even farther, would have the chance to advance and score a run. A ball hit outside of the field is technically called a foul, and he couldn’t proceed with the run. Then after that, three missed strikes at the ball meant the batter was out, along with if the batter hit a ball up and in the air, it was caught, which also meant the player was out. Another thing that doesn’t relate to now is that if the player hit the ball, then the ball went to the ground then it was caught, the player would throw the hard ball at the hitter. Now, it is that you have to tag the hitter with the ball to avoid any serious injuries that can show or happen. This book carries a legacy, and we hear more about the Rounders players, and we hear more is what brings us to know what baseball is today.
